The floor spun by. A blazing nova, then galaxies of stars burned out his optic nerve and darkness struck. For an instant infinity equalled zero.
Then his good eye opened and puzzled at the mountain so close its wrinkled gray surface was a blur. As he raised his cheek from the floor the mountain became Hogan's trouser leg. The Captain felt his throat constrict. Painfully word-pictures forced themselves upon him. Hogan, Grimes, Hogan, Grimes, they whirled in a tightening circle of hysteria.
"Captain," Spencer's quiet voice broke the chain of self-recrimination. "Can you hear me, Captain?"
The Captain leaped erect and brushed a nasty mess of skin and jelly from his shoulder.
Think about it later; let the court of inquiry think about it, he told himself. You're their Captain, man. Act like one.
Swiftly he untied Spencer. Then, kneeling beside each of the three unconscious men, he carefully extracted the thing's progeny from their necks, twisting and bullying the tiny parasites until they drew in their nerve extensions and came loose in his hands.
In the icebox between the celery and the beer cans they resembled three over-ripe avocados as their frantic pulsations died away and the cold made wrinkles in their skins.
"The trans-galactic biology teams will want them alive. We will keep them in suspended animation the way the thing survived so long until we reach--" The Captain's voice faltered as he readied Templar's hypo; Ives was already groaning and trying to sit up, but he wanted Templar to awaken more gently. "--Earth."
"Earth," Spencer repeated solemnly. "Earth, Earth, Earth." Suddenly he smiled and the Captain's smile joined him.